Toshiba Thrive AT150 7-inch tablet pictures and hands-on

Over in Vegas at CES there's plenty of hype that Toshiba is all set to unleash a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7-inch tab; one that will hit the budget end of the Android tab spectrum.

At the Japanese company's pre-CES press event, however, the purported little tab was nowhere no be seen, although we did manage to get our hands on the original 7-inch offering from Toshiba - the Toshiba Thrive AT150.

A messy and finger-print strewn AT150, it has to be said, one that had obviously been fondled more times than a Vegas cocktail waitress in a room full of drunk tech journalists.

The 7-inch device is definitely more AT100 (the UK name for the original Thrive) than AT200 (or whatever it's called). At least in terms of thickness, measuring almost 12mm thick and weighing in at 400g.

The display is an LED backlit AutoBrite one with a 1280x800 resolution and it packs Tosh's Adaptive Display and Resolution+ technologies. The cameras are of the 5-megapixel and 2-megapixel variety, although Toshiba state that both are "HD". Connectivity is via mini-USB, micro-HDMI, microSD, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS and there's 16 or 32GB of onboard storage for you to play with.

It feels pretty bulky in the hand, thanks to the rubberised backing, but it is a material that also gives you a more comfortable grip than is usually on offer from a phablet sized device. Performance on the model we took for a spin was a little sluggish, it has to be said, despite it packing an Nvidia Tegra 2 chip.

The Thrive AT150 starts at $380 for the 16GB version, or $430 for the 32GB number, making it much pricier than the Kindle Fire that seems to have the little-tab market sewn up. There's no word on a UK release, as of yet, and we wouldn't expect it to cause any great shakes should we get one.